Technical Field
The present invention relates to a side airbag device for a vehicle, which allows a side airbag to deploy on a side part of a seated occupant.
Related Art
An automobile (vehicle) may be provided with a side airbag device for protecting a seated occupant from an impact at the time of a side-impact crash of the vehicle.
Many side airbag devices for a vehicle use a structure in which an inflator and a side airbag are stored in a side portion of a seat back constituting a seat. When a side-impact crash occurs, a folded side airbag moves toward the front of the seat while being expanded by the gas generated by the inflator, and deploys at a side part of the occupant.
Some side airbags are configured to include a plurality of chambers such as a chamber that deploys beside the shoulder and the chest of an occupant and a chamber that deploys beside the lower back of the occupant.
Meanwhile, as the shoulder and lower back of the occupant are wider than the other regions of the body, the spaces between such regions and the inner surface of the door tend to be narrower than that of the other regions of the body. As such, chambers are required to deploy earlier in such regions.
In order to realize early deployment of a plurality of chambers, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-184595, a technology has been proposed in which a channel section, allowing an upper chamber and a lower chamber to communicate with each other, is provided to distribute gas generated by an inflator into a plurality of chambers via the channel section.
However, the plurality of chambers each have different internal capacities (chamber capacity, because the outer shapes are different). As such, the time taken for completely deploying the chamber differs from each other.
In view of the above, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-184640, another technology has also been proposed in which when a particular chamber is filled with gas pressure due to distribution to a plurality of chambers, the pressure in such a chamber prevents the gas from flowing into a particular chamber whereby the gas is led to the chambers other than the particular chamber.
Meanwhile, as a space between a seat side part and an inner surface of the door differs by each vehicle model, for example, a side airbag is required to have a deployment characteristic suitable for each vehicle model, in addition to early deployment.